Should it be something you learn? Sure. Should it be the first thing you learn in the stack, or something that blocks you from shipping? Shrug. Some people feel

Should it be something you learn? Sure. Should it be the first thing you learn in the stack, or something that blocks you from shipping? Shrug. Some people feel the need to depth-first-search their stack as part of the learning process. But at some point you have to say "This is as deep in the stack as I'm going to care about today" -- otherwise you end up sitting down to make a web app and studying particle physics. I think 2 years ago, you absolutely needed to go that deep, mostly because when you sat down to work in the React ecosystem, you were almost certainly going to end up debugging something in a webpack config. I don't think that's the case today. It's a nice-to-have, and certainly will bring value eventually, but at this point I'm hoping to pull my non-C-R-A apps onto C-R-A so that managing the tooling isn't my job. Plenty of devs ship plenty of business value in Rails without understanding the full stack, and that's fine. It's worth taking a deep dive when needed, or when specific concerns make themselves known, but saying "you need to learn everything now!" is a huge barrier to entry -- getting those out of the way is a good thing.